Oculus Rift is about to get a lot prettier, and here's why

Oculus VR is in the middle of a Facebook acquisition, though that hasn't stopped the start-up from gobbling up other companies in an attempt to make the Oculus Rift prototype look a lot prettier in the long run.

The Irvine-based company has announced it agreed to buy the Carbon Design team. You may not know about the industrial design and product engineering team, which has apparently won more than 50 awards, but you've certainly heard of their hardware devices. Carbon Design developed the Xbox 360 Controller and Kinect peripheral as well as the Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse - to name a few.

"As a company, Carbon Design has a 20 year history of taking consumer, industrial and medical products from concept to completion. Carbon approaches products with a design-driven methodology rooted in quality engineering, ergonomics, deep user insights, and rapid iteration," explained the Oculus VR team in a blog post. "All of this adds up to an incredible skill set to deliver ground-breaking new virtual reality products."

Oculus VR is the much-talked-about company behind the Oculus Rift head-mounted display for immersive virtual reality. Although the Oculus Rift is still a prototype, it is assumed Carbon Design will help craft the final look of the device and make it appear more attractive and sleek to consumers. The Oculus Rift is widely expected to become available in late 2014 or early 2015, but that hasn't been confirmed.

“A few seconds with the latest Oculus prototypes and you know that virtual reality is for real this time. From a design and engineering perspective, building the products that finally deliver consumer virtual reality is one of the most interesting and challenging problem sets ever," explained Peter Bristol, the Creative Director at Carbon Design, in a blog post. "We’re incredibly excited to be part of the team and we’re looking forward to helping design the future.”

As part of the acquisition, the Carbon Design team will become a "key component" of Oculus VR's product engineering group. The team will operate from the Carbon studio in Seattle, while working with the the Oculus R&D team in Redmond. In fact, the team has already been working with Oculus VR for nearly year on multiple announced projects.

Oculus VR expects the acquisition of Carbon Design to finalise by end of summer.